1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to home appliance network systems, and more particularly to a home appliance network system and a method for operating the same, wherein a device monitoring module is used to independently store and update product information of a plurality of home appliances connected to a network, thereby making it possible to rapidly monitor the product information of the home appliances using a small amount of network system resources.
2. Description of the Related Art
FIG. 1 shows the configuration of a general home appliance network system.
In general, a home network system (or home appliance network system) means a system wherein a plurality of home appliances installed in a home, including a personal computer (PC), are equipped with network interfaces, respectively, so that they can be networked and thus integrated in one network constructed in the home to transmit and receive data to/from one another over the network to control one another.
With the rapid spread of the Internet, followed by the significant increase in the number of Internet users, recently, home servers for management/control of home network systems have been equipped with Internet modems so that home appliance users can not only collect information over the Internet in homes, but also access the home servers over the Internet from remote locations to control home appliances connected to networks constructed in the homes.
Such a general home appliance network system includes, as 10 shown in FIG. 1, a plurality of home appliances H1-H4 connected to a network constructed in a home, and a home server 1 for controlling the home appliances H1-H4. As recently proposed, each of the home appliances H1-H4 is additionally provided with an Internet access function in a process of being manufactured to be controllable over the network, so that a user can use the Internet at any place in the home through the use of home appliances other than a PC.
In the home appliance network system, particularly, the user can not only recognize state information of a specific home appliance at any place inside of the home, but also control the specific home appliance through the use of control means, such as a computer, at any place outside of the home. In this regard, the home appliance network system has obtained favorable responses from many consumers, and thus has become more widespread in its application day by day.
However, in the above-mentioned home appliance network system, in order to monitor the states of the home appliances H1-H4 to control those appliances, the user personally sends a control signal to each of the home appliances H1-H4 over the network through the home server 1, and each of the home appliances H1-H4 receives and analyzes the sent control signal and sends its own state information to the home server 1 according to a result of the analysis so that the user can recognize the state information.
As a result, whenever the user attempts to monitor the states of the home appliances H1-H4, the home server 1 has to repeat an operation of sending a control signal to each of the home appliances H1-H4 and displaying product information or state information, sent from each of the home appliances H1-H4 in response to the control signal, to provide a visual indication of the product information or state information to the user, resulting in a lengthy period of time being required from the input of a state monitoring signal by the user until the information display.
The above-mentioned home appliance network system has another disadvantage in that it requires a large amount of resources to smoothly carry out the above operation.
In addition, when the user attempts to search for product information of a specific one of the home appliances H1-H4 connected to the network through the home server 1, even all of the other home appliances, which need not be controlled, receive a control signal sent from the home server 1, thereby degrading efficiency and reliability of network communication.